War games, etc.: A preliminary overview of some of Mark Robinowitz’s evidence about 9/11

In a comment on my post about Chip Berlet and “Conspiracism”, charlienneb has asked me to recommend an assertion of Mark Robinowitz’s for him to take a look at. So, I’ll now try to present what Robinowitz has said is some of his best evidence. I cannot vouch for everything he says, because he deals with a lot of matters I personally have not yet researched in depth.

For me personally, regarding 9/11, the smoking gun is the straight-down vertical, almost-symmetrical collapse of WTC 7, plus all the subsequent hampering and fudging of investigations. I’ve also spent quite a bit of time studying arguments for and against the idea that WTC 1 and 2 too were demolished with explosives and/or thermite/thermate, and I’m inclined to think it’s highly likely that they were.

But Robinowitz, on the other hand, prefers not to rely on demolition theories, or on physical-evidence arguments of any kind. He has made some good arguments against relying on physical evidence. Most people have almost no scientific background whatsoever and hence are not in a good position to evaluate physical evidence on their own. Although I’m no expert either, I personally do have a strong general scientific and engineering background, including two years of physics in college, which, I believe, is enough background for me to evaluate most (though not all) of the scientific arguments that have been made on both sides. But most people don’t share my background, so it would behoove me to see if I can build a solid case for government complicity in the 9/11 attacks (at least LIHOP, if not MIHOP) without any reference to demolition, either in the direct physical evidence or in the evidence of a coverup.
Robinowitz believes he has such a case. Because I’ve been asked about it, I’ll now discuss some of Robinowitz’s evidence as best I can without yet having done the needed further research. In later posts I’ll comment on other websites that he recommends, plus other websites I’m aware of which likewise focus on matters not requiring any scientific knowledge.

Robinowitz documents most of his claims, but there are, in my opinion, a few gaps in his documentation. He compensates for the gaps with good common-sense reasoning. However, to build a really solid case, it would be desirable to have documentation for those points too. I’ll be pointing out the gaps below, as I present his arguments. I would appreciate it very much if any readers could point me to some relevant primary-source documentation, if it exists.

On his Best evidence page, Robinowitz lists as the “Best documented evidence”:

suppressed warnings (from FBI investigation of flight schools and from US allies warning 9/11 was imminent), failure to follow standard operating procedure during the attacks, Air Force and intelligence wargames on 9/11

On a page about prior warnings, he includes the following, among other items:

A copy of “Dozens of warnings preceded 9/11” by Eric Lichtblau, The New York Times, Thursday, February 10, 2005, as reprinted in the International Herald Tribune

What Did They Know – collection of news stories about prior warnings and other foreknowledge, on MakeThemAccountable.com

In email to me, Robinowitz mentioned Coleen Rowley, an FBI agent who blew the whistle on how, before 9/11, the Washington office of the FBI had blocked investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was subsequently indicted as a conspirator in the 9/11 attacks. A copy of her memo can be found on the Time magazine site.

The above does not, by itself, prove government complicity, but it’s part of a larger pattern of actions and inactions by various government agencies which allowed the attacks of 9/11 to happen. The larger pattern, taken as a whole, is indeed suspicious, worthy of an investigation with subpoena power, by someone without Philip Zelikow’s ties to the Bush administration.

For critics of the official story of 9/11, the smokiest of the smoking guns is the “failure” of NORAD to intercept the planes.

…

Apologists for the Bush regime state that since they were not expecting the 9/11 scenario, and thought that the hijacking would be a “traditional” type hijack, but this avoids the question of why the off-course planes were not intercepted (a procedure that does not require Presidential authorization, unlike the order to shoot down the plane).

According to David Ray Griffin in Debunking 9/11 Debunking, there were two distinct protocols that the FAA and NORAD could have followed, the hijacking protocol and the emergency protocol. According to Griffin, the FAA and NORAD should have followed the emergency protocal because of the loss of radio contact and transponder signal. This should have resulted in a faster response, by the FAA and NORAD, than the hijacking protocol, which was admittedly slower, since “traditional” hijackings were not necessarily considered emergencies before 9/11. (If anyone can direct me to some good documentation on this, I would very much appreciate it. Unfortunately, Griffin’s documentation isn’t the best. Mark Robinowitz, by the way, does not endorse Griffin’s books.) In any case, once the first plane hit WTC 1, and especially after the second plane hit WTC 2, all other hijackings should surely have been treated as emergencies.

Back to Mark Robinowitz:

Even if one is willing to grant exceptional deference to the Bush / Cheney administration, and pretend that they had no idea 9/11 was about to happen, there is no excuse for this ignorance at 9:03 am, when the second (South) tower was hit. At that point, the entire military’s air defense system had no doubt that the hijackings were intentional, multiple attacks, and that additional hijacked planes would be used as weapons. This is the time when “President” Bush was content to continue to read to second graders, instead of assuming his duties as Commander-in-Chief.

When the second tower was struck, Flight 77 was near the Ohio – West Virginia border. Around this time, that plane made an unscheduled 180 degree turn, and stopped communicating with air traffic control — a big clue that this was also one of the hijacked planes. Nevertheless, no serious efforts were made to intercept this plane between 9:03 am and 9:38 am, when it hit the west side of the Pentagon. Planes were scrambled from an air base in the Norfolk, Virginia area during this time, but inexplicably were sent east over the ocean, instead of northwest toward the Washington area. (The weather that morning was perfectly clear, and there is no innocent explanation for why these interceptor planes were sent over the water, away from DC, instead of toward the National Capitol Area.)

The 9/11 Commission report placed all the blame on the FAA, which many people have questioned on various grounds. In discussing this point, it would be helpful to have documentation of exactly what the FAA’s standard operating procedures actually were back in September 2001. Unfortunately I haven’t found this on any of the 9/11 Truth websites I’ve looked at so far, other than some broken links to pages on the FAA website that no longer exist. Also I was unsatisfied with the references that David Ray Griffin provided, on this particular point, in Debunking 9/11 Debunking (although I don’t remember, offhand, exactly why I was unsatisfied with them). However, without primary-source documentation of the FAA’s actual standard operating procedures at that time, we don’t have a complete answer to those who would claim that the problem was just FAA incompetence or inadequate standard operating procedures. It has been widely claimed in the mass media that the FAA’s and NORAD’s SOP’s back then were not adequate to deal with the situation, but were made stricter after 9/11. If indeed the SOP’s were adequate before 9/11, I would appreciate it very much if anyone reading this could point me to some good documentation. When I asked Mark Robinowitz about this, he suggested that I read Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert. Not having read this book yet, I cannot comment further.

In the meantime, various people have made some good common-sense arguments against the idea of FAA incompetence or inadequate SOP’s. For example, on his page about The “Stand Down” of the Air Force on 9/11, Robinowitz writes:

The 9/11 Commission blamed the FAA for screwing up the response to the hijackings, yet FAA safely landed more than 4,000 planes at airports that were not expecting them immediately after the attacks began.

The point here being that the FAA managed to accomplish a totally unprecedented task without incident, which makes it unlikely that they would have been so utterly incompetent at a task which was more routine, e.g. calling NORAD in the event of trouble.

Robinowitz then argues, further:

It has been standard operating procedures for decades to immediately intercept off course planes that do not respond to communications from air traffic controllers. When the Air Force “scrambles” a fighter plane to intercept, they usually reach the plane in question in minutes. The Air Force plane will then fly next to the non-responsive plane, and rock their wings — a way to say “follow me” to a nearby airport (if the plane merely has lost its radio equipment). If the intercepted plane refuses to respond, there is a graduated series of actions the Air Force can use — firing tracer bullets in front of the plane, even shooting it down if it is a threat. This is analogous to police pulling motorists over for having their lights out – every driver in the US knows that when a police car behind them turns on their siren, they are supposed to pull over, just like every pilot knows that when an Air Force fighter plane pulls beside them, they are supposed to follow their orders, too. If the light bulb has merely burned out, the motorist will get a warning, but the police have a graduated series of responses they can employ if the driver is not merely having a mechanical problem (ie. they have just robbed a bank and are driving with the lights off to avoid being seen).

The airspace over the northeastern US is among the busiest on the planet. It is home to the nation’s political, military and financial headquarters, the largest population concentrations, and key strategic facilities. A jumbo jet in this area suddenly changing direction and altitude, and refusing to respond to air traffic controllers would be as dangerous as a truck on a busy rush-hour freeway driving the wrong way at full speed. When planes go off course in this busy environment, instant reactions make the difference between life and death — which is why NORAD (North American Air Defense) practices these kinds of scenarios, and instantly scrambles fighters when there is any hint of a problem.

Some people easily accept an incompetence theory on the alleged grounds that all bureaucracies are always, everywhere, and inevitably incompetent. But this is an unjustified blanket claim. Bureaucracies are sometime competent, sometimes not, depending on how well-trained their employees are, what their protocols are, etc. Also a government agency may be good at some tasks but not others. (An example David Ray Griffin gave in Debunking 9/11 Debunking is that the U.S. armed forces are good at invading other countries, but not good at occupying other countries.)

So then, what was the FAA’s and/or NORAD’s problem on 9/11?

Some people have alleged that a “stand down” order must have been given to the FAA and/or NORAD. Mark Robinowitz does not believe that a “stand down” order was given, because there would have been too great a risk of such an order being disobeyed. As he explains on his page about the war games:

It would be like asking a firefighter who had trained their entire adult life to “stand down” when their neighbor’s house was burning and the inhabitants trapped inside (or worse, asking that firefighter to “stand down” from protecting the next house on the block from catching fire from the first burning house). In this analogy, the firefighter would probably ignore orders from his or her boss to stand down, and would seek to rescue the neighbors without worrying about the consequences until later.

So, Robinowitz believes that normal responses, by both the FAA and NORAD, must have been interfered with in ways subtler than an outright “stand down” order.

He has a page discussing what he and others have alleged were an unusually large number of war games (training exercises) taking place on the morning of 9/11, thereby distracting the FAA, NORAD, the CIA, and other government agencies from doing what they normally might have been able to do the stop the planes from hitting the buildings — or at least the WTC buildings. As Robinowitz points out, the exercises don’t explain why the Pentagon was allowed to be hit, because the exercises would surely have been called off by the time the second WTC tower was hit. But he regards the war games as strong evidence of government complicity.

To know whether the war games are, in fact, truly anomolous enough to be strong evidence of complicity on the part of whoever scheduled all these exercises, one would also need to know how often such exercises were normally conducted and, therefore, how unusual it truly was to schedule so many exercises on a single day. Perhaps this is discussed in the hooks and websites he recommends. In the meantime, I would appreciate it very much if anyone else reading this could point me to such information.

In any case, the content of some of these drills, and of other similar drills before 9/11, clearly indicate that the government had in fact anticipated the possibility of an attack similar to 9/11, and so was not nearly as unprepared as some government officials have alleged.

This war game was not a “terrorism” exercise – but it did simulate a plane going off course (on the approach to nearby Dulles Airport) and crashing into the NRO’s headquarters, control center for US spy satellites. This war game was to test the emergency response procedures in the event of this type of accident, and included practice evacuation of the buildings. It is very damning that the war game planners (of all of the war games, not merely this one) ensured that the NRO’s headquarters was largely evacuated at precisely the time that 9/11 was taking place, which minimized the number of officials who were able to monitor the events via the Pentagon’s satellite intelligence systems.

The NRO is, effectively, the “eyes of the world”. With the majority of American spy satellites at its fingertips, it can reasonably be assumed that NRO headquarters was an indispensable resource to NORAD and the Air Force from 8:28 when Flight 77 made its unplanned 180-degree turn over Pennsylvania, until 9:38 when it is said to have struck the Pentagon. The NRO claims as soon as the real world events “began to unfold” the drill was called off and all but the most essential personnel were sent home. (UPI, Aug 22, 2002)
Read that last sentence again.Why was the NRO sending home personnel during what was likely the biggest military crisis on American soil in recent history? Who were the “most essential” personnel and what did those individuals do as events unfolded?

The citation is from UPI. Has anyone confirmed, from any other news source, that “all but the most essential personnel were sent home”? If accurate, it is indeed exceedingly strange. But how suspicious this it would depend on just how few people were considered “essential.” So, some further investigation is needed before this is hailed as damning evidence.

Robinowitz’s page about the war games is, unfortunately, not very well-organized, so I’ll give some of the highlights below. He starts by recommending Michael Ruppert’s book Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, as “the most indepth analysis of the 9/11 war games.” Robinowitz then points us to a summary of the main points of Rupport’s book, Crossing the Rubicon: Simplifying the case against Dick Cheney by Michael Kane.

Robinowitz also refers us to the Military exercises up to 9/11 in the “Complete 9/11 timeline” on the Cooperative Research site. Robinowitz calls this page “Required reading for everyone concerned about the ‘failure’ of the Air Force to stop the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon.”

He also refers us to The Fog of War Games on Margie Burns’s blog. This page lists a bunch of war games known to have taken place on 9/11, with documentation.

Further down on his page about the war games, Robinowitz too has a table listing specific war games, with primary source documentation for most of them, and briefly explains how some of them interfered with the FAA’s and/or NORAD’s responses on 9/11.

After that is a brief mention of NORAD’s changing timelines, which suggest a coverup of some kind (though they do not, in and of themselves, indicate what sort of thing is being covered up).

What was the value-added benefit for the 9/11 hijackers in turning off their transponder signals?
The planes remained visible to radar; the transponders merely ID’d the flights. And yet the transponders of all four flights were switched off. What was gained?
I think the answer is found in the proliferation of wargames on September 11, particularly the exercise called “Vigilant Guardian”: the live-fly simulation of hijackings in the US Northeast staged by the Joint Chiefs and NORAD the very morning of the attacks. (Health advisory to coincidentalists: chew carefully before digesting.)At one time on 9/11, as many as 22 aircraft appeared to be hijacked. Suddenly, the virtue, now verging on necessity, of switching off the transponders becomes evident. With loss of transponder signals the planes became bogies, and discriminating real from simulated hijackings became next to impossible.
This confusion compounded the paralysis already introduced to the system by drawing most of the Eastern seaboard’s combat-ready interceptors into Northern Canada for the wargame “Northern Vigilence,” and changing the standing orders for a shootdown in June 2001 by removing the discretion of field commanders and placing it solely in the hands of the Secretary of Defense.

Officials at NORAD have stated when the hijackings first occurred they initially thought it was part of the Vigilant Guardian drills running that morning. Despite some confusion, once Flight 11 struck the World Trade Center at 8:45 am, everyone should have known it was not a test. However, this is still an assumption because we do not know what the fighter jocks in the air at the time did and did not know, we do not know the full extent of the orders they received and it has yet to be explained why scrambled fighter jets were unable to intercept even one of the 4 hijacked airliners.Scrambling Fighter Jets
Standard operating procedure of both FAA & NORAD dictates that once an aircraft is off course and/or its transponder is not responding, within 10 minutes Air Force jets are scrambled to re-establish physical contact with the wayward plane.
Scrambling Air Force interceptors does not mean shooting down any aircraft. It simply means that an Air Force jet is dispatched to fly next to the off course aircraft, attempt to communicate with the its pilots, look inside the cockpit, see who is in control of the plane and report back to flight control what is actually happening. In the year prior to 9/11 this automatic procedure was triggered a total of 67 times (AP, 8/13/02). On the morning of 9/11, it was not successfully applied even once in the well over an hour-long period in which the four separate hijackings occurred. Why?
The most egregious case is that of Flight 77, reported to have struck the Pentagon. At 8:50 am there was a loss of contact with this plane that was now well off course and hurtling toward the nation’s capital, but it was not until 9:24 am that fighter jets were scrambled. That’s 34 minutes after flight control lost contact with the plane and well after 2 hijacked aircraft had already crashed into both World Trade Center towers.
Fighter Planes were dispatched extremely late to the World Trade Center as well, and only made it there after Flight 175 had crashed into WTC 2, too late to be effective. Those planes were then sent back to base, instead of being sent in pursuit of an aircraft, which by that time was widely known to have been well off course. Why?
Did war games conducted by the Air Force, NORAD, NRO and others on 9/11 unintentionally cause this unprecedented ‘confusion’, or does all of this point to more disturbing conclusions about what happened that tragic morning?

As mentioned earlier, the war games could account only for confusion that occurred before the war games were called off. They could not account for why Flight 77 was allowed to hit the Pentagon. The 9/11 Commission Report claims that, at that point, there was confusion caused by a “Phantom Flight 11.” Assuming this is true (which has been questioned by David Ray Griffin, among others), where could “Phantom Flight 11” possibly have come from? On his page about the warnings Robinowitz links to THE FAA KNEW! But were they set up? by Michael Kane, containing the following hypothesis as to how “Phantom Flight 11” might have been generated:

The real issue with the FAA on 9/11 is Ptech.

Ptech (now Go Agile) was the company that supplied the enterprise architecture software for most of the federal government and its military agencies. This included the Whitehouse, Secret Service, Air Force and FAA. This software is able to analyze the critical data throughout an enterprise in real-time. For federal aviation, the most critical data of all lies on FAA radar screens.

Ptech was owned and funded by Saudi terror financiers with reported links to the Bush administration. But it was the Clinton administration that granted Ptech high military security clearance in 1996, when they began receiving contracts throughout the entire federal government.

Why wasn’t Ptech ever mentioned in the 9/11 Commission report? Why is the FAA being blamed for 9/11 without any mention of the appalling fact that Ptech was in the FAA for (at least) 2 years with access to their entire data blueprint and all FAA databases?

Ptech’s software is powerful enough to have allowed intentional, specific manipulation of real-time information on FAA radar screens. Remember, on 9/11 the Air Force was in the middle of simulated war games that involved false blips, referred to as “radar injects,” on FAA screens (see Crossing the Rubicon for full documentation). Add into this equation the very real possibility of such an inject remaining on FAA screens after the war games were called off – which seems to be exactly what happened.

…

Ptech had access to the entire informational barn door of the FAA’s data systems. In an amazing exchange published in part 1 of this series, FTW editor Jamey Hecht was able to confirm a central thesis of Crossing the Rubicon while interviewing Wall Street whistleblower Indira Singh. Ms. Singh is an IT professional who started First Boston’s first Information Technology group in 1975 and had worked on Wall Street until 2002. She’s been an IT consultant for Banker’s Trust, the U.N., JP Morgan, and American Express. In 1988 she started TibetNet – a derivative of DARPA’s Internet, the service on which you are likely reading this report at the moment. The exchange was as follows:

Jamey Hecht: You said at the 9/11 Citizens’ Commission hearings, you mentioned – its on page 139 of transcript – that Ptech was with Mitre Corporation in the basement of the FAA for 2 years prior to 9/11 and their specific job was to look at interoperability issues the FAA had with NORAD and the Air Force, in case of an emergency.

Indira Singh: Yes, I have a good diagram for that…

Jamey Hecht: And that relationship had been going on mediated by Ptech for 2 years prior to 9/11. You elsewhere say that the Secret Service is among the government entities that had a contract with Ptech. Mike Ruppert’s thesis in Crossing the Rubicon, as you know, is that the software that was running information between FAA & NORAD was superseded by a parallel subsuming version of itself that was being run by the Secret Service on state of the art parallel equipment in the PEOC with a nucleus of Secret Service personnel around Cheney.

…In your view, might it have been the case that Cheney was using Ptech to surveil the function of the people who wanted to do their jobs on the day of 9/11 in FAA & NORAD, and then intervene to turn off the legitimate response?

Indira Singh: Is it possible from a software standpoint? Absolutely it’s possible. Did he (Cheney) have such a capability? I don’t know. But that’s the ideal risk scenario – to have an over-arching view of what’s going on in data. That’s exactly what I wanted for JP Morgan.

A more complete story about Indira Singh, also by Michael Kane, can be found here.

Of course, we have no hard evidence that the Ptech system was in fact used in the way these stories suggest. The above is only speculation. If the description of Ptech is accurate, then the above speculation establishes only that Dick Cheney had the means to disrupt the FAA’s response on 9/11. Establishing possible means is indeed a valid and vital step in building a good criminal case, although more is necessary, of course.

Why was there so much confusion, after the war games had been called off? Such confusion can’t possibly be normal, or else air traffic controllers would never have been able to do their jobs very well, and plane crashes would be commonplace. So, something unusual had to have caused the huge amount of confusion on 9/11. But what?

A truly independent investigation with subpoena power would be needed in order to resolve this issue.

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In the meantime I have looked a little at your page on WTC7. The annotated chapter of the FEMA report seems to be the work of a conpiracist to me. FEMA are accused of being dishonest and deceitful but, as you stated yourself:

However, as even the FEMA report itself admitted, “the best hypothesis” along these lines “has only a low probability of occurrence.”

FEMA’s statement is hardly the statement of an organization intending to deceive. The writer of the annotations accuses FEMA of either faking a picture of the vast plume of smoke from WTC7 or mispresenting smoke/dust from the towers as smoke from WTC7. I think this video shows him to be wrong:

The list of quotes from politicians who state that if all the intelligence had been acted upon, the attacks could have been stopped. I agree with this, but the fact that various agencies failed to get their act together doesn’t mean they did so by design.

The list of countries who supposedly supplied warnings:The problem with cooperativeresearch.org is that many of their links to sources do not work. However, I believe a great these warnings applied to US interests around the globe and do not specify the means of attack. It would be wrong to imply that these warnings should have alerted US Intelligence to attacks specifically in the US and specifically by crashing aircraft.

The article from the New York Times via the International Herald Tribune about the FAA and warnings, whose source is a “previously undisclosed report from the 9/11 Commission” (no link provided): The article tells us that the FAA received dozens of relevant intelligence reports about terrorism in the months before 9/11. As these intelligence reports come from the CIA and FBI, it’s hard to square the conpiracist claims that these same intelligence agencies deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen. The article tells us that the FAA was “lulled into a false sense of security” and goes o to tell us that “Federal aviation and natural security officials believed the threat was
focused overseas, the report said, and the commission found no evidence that the FAA had specific intelligence indicating that Al Qaeda was plotting to hijack commercial planes within the United States and use them as
weapons”, although the FAA did brief unspecfied airlines and airports about terrorism. Should the FAA have done more? Possibly. Any evidence here of deliberately allowing things to happen? No.

The “whatdidtheyknow” page is a mish-mash of stuff. Some I know to be false, others are not relevant to warnings.

I can’t go through them all, but debunking sites such as 911mtyhs.com deal with them. I do smile when ever conpiracist claims cite Richard Clarke. Richard Clarke is an authoratative witness, he was in a postion to know
things. Does he think 9/11 was an inside job? No. Does he say in the preface in Popular Mechanic’s Debunking9/11 Myths that the book tells it the way it was? Yes!

Coleen Rowley: Its quite clear from Ms Rowley’s memo that she blames bureaucracy, laws and error for the failure to secure a search warrant for Massaoui’s computer. It is clear from the body of her text there was a problem obtaining warrants. Here is just one she cites:

“Another factor that cannot be underestimated as to the HQ Supervisor’s apparent reluctance to do anything was/is the ever present risk of being “written up” for an Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) “error.” In the year(s) preceding the September 11th acts of terrorism, numerous alleged IOB violations on the part of FBI personnel had to be submitted to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) as well as the IOB. I believe the chilling effect on all levels of FBI agents assigned to intelligence matters and their manager hampered us from aggressive investigation of terrorists. Since one generally only runs the risk of IOB violations when one does something, the safer course is to do nothing.”

Now, if Mr Robinowitz could show that similar warrant requests were obtained without meeting the problems that Coleen Rowley describes, that might be something. But Ms Rowley’s memo is clear; the problem was case wide, not specific to Massaoui’s case.

The “Stand Down” of the Air Force on 9/11

I find this section a little confusing. It’s entltled” Why there was NOT a “stand down” order”, but goes on to to make stand down type arguments, only to finish up by saying a stand down order would have been too risky. As he
agrees there was no stand down, I should not need to comment further, but I will make these points:

“The 9/11 Commission blamed the FAA for screwing up the response to the hijackings, yet FAA safely landed more than 4,000 planes at airports that were not expecting them immediately after the attacks began.”

I take the point here about landing planes all at once, but landing planes is something the FAA is well practised at.They land thousands of planes,day after day, year after year. If they had dealt with hijackings frequently, they would be no doubt have reponded better.

When the Air Force “scrambles” a fighter plane to intercept, they usually reach the plane in question in minutes.”

There is no source for his claim. When he says Air Force, he should say NORAD. Only NORAD has aircraft in any state of readiness and even these take ~6 minutes to take off from the time the order is given to do so, let alone the further flying time to reach a target. On 9/11, the northeast sector of NORAD, NEADS, had their normal complement of two pairs of aircraft on standby, one pair at Otis Air Force base and one pair at Langley. How long
does it take for non-NORAD planes to get ready to fly? Well, on 9/11 Andrews Air Force base was asked to ready planes – they were ready one hour later, too late to do anything. 9/11myths.com has an interesting page on
intercepts – http://911myths.com/html/intercept_time.html

“Ultimately, Flight 93 was shot down around 10:06 am near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, although this was kept concealed from the public.”

Flight 93 was brought down because of the actions of some brave passengers fighting for their lives. All the evidence, particularly the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, which shows all systems functioning
normally until the plane hit the ground, point to this. All that’s offered here is conpiracist speculation. I find that insulting to the memory of these passengers.

(Diane, like you, I haven’t been able to find documentary evidence of pre-9/11 FAA hijacking protocols, but the

9/11 Commission report states this:

“From interviews of controllers at various FAA centers, we learned that an air traffic controller’s first response to an

aircraft incident is to notify a supervisor, who then notifies the traffic management unit and the operations manager in charge.The FAA center next notifies the appropriate regional operations center (ROC), which in turn
contacts FAA head-quarters.”

We know from the NORAD tapes that a controller at Boston Center circumvented all of this by contacting NEADS directly about the hijacking of AA11, which is a strange way to run a stand down!).

War Games

Nowhere does Mr Robinowtz demonstrate how any drill or exercise hampered or confused the FAA or NORAD.

Please see these 911myths pages about he NRO drill and transponder blips:

One article Robinowitz cite makes some play of the fact that Flight 77 was not intercepted and indicates that it was known hijacking at 8.50am. This is not so. Flight 77 had its last routine contat at 8.50am. At 8.54m it deviated from it’s assigned flight path by turning south. Two minutes later, it’s transponder was turned off. The controller looked for a blip on primary radar and coud not find one. He tried contacting it by radio – nothing. With no transponder return, no primary radar return and no radio contact the controller assumed 77 had crashed, which was the only scenario in which these three events occur simulltaneously. Shorlty after 9.00am Indianapolis Center reported 77 missing and at 9.08am asked for a search and rescue mission to look for a downed aircraft and the West Virgnia State Police to do the same. Only at 9.20am did Indianapolis Center learn that there had been earlierhijackings and began to reconsider its evaluation of 77. They began to look for a primary radar return for 77,looking west along it’s original course and south, the direction of it’s last known heading. Unknown to them, 77 had turned east and was heading towards Washington. The FAA command center was informed that 77 was a potential hijacking at 9.21am and they ifnformed NEADS, who requested the Langley fighters to scramble at 9.23am .At 9.30 am the Lanley fighter were airborne, too late to stop 77 hitting the Pentagon at 9.37.46.

You may ask why there 77 dispappeared from primary radar. Simply, there were areas of the US where there were holes in the primary radar coverage and 77 entered such an area. Missing coverage is not a problem when all planes
have transponders, but when they are deliberately turned off a problem arises.
From all of this, I understand why 77 was not intercepted and can attach no blame to NORAD, nor even the FAA and I don’t see any evidence of a conpiracy.

The Ptech stuff is pure speculation. I have only one comment on this: As this company received approval during the Clinton administration, does this mean the Clinton administration is also part of the conpiracy? If it does, I can’t take any more!

The article from the New York Times via the International Herald Tribune about the FAA and warnings, whose source is a “previously undisclosed report from the 9/11 Commission” (no link provided): The article tells us that the FAA received dozens of relevant intelligence reports about terrorism in the months before 9/11. As these intelligence reports come from the CIA and FBI, it’s hard to square the conpiracist claims that these same intelligence agencies deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen. The article tells us that the FAA was “lulled into a false sense of security” and goes o to tell us that “Federal aviation and natural security officials believed the threat was
focused overseas, the report said, and the commission found no evidence that the FAA had specific intelligence indicating that Al Qaeda was plotting to hijack commercial planes within the United States and use them as
weapons”, although the FAA did brief unspecfied airlines and airports about terrorism. Should the FAA have done more? Possibly. Any evidence here of deliberately allowing things to happen? No.

The question here is why the FAA wasn’t warned, specifically, about the possibility of an attack on U.S. soil, given that some of the other warnings did point to this possibility.

Anyhow, I don’t believe that the FBI and the CIA, as a whole, could have been in on the 9/11 plot, which would have to have been the work of fairly small cabal of high-level people. (Otherwise, too many people would have known about it, which would have been too great a risk for something so blatantly treasonous.)

The “Stand Down” of the Air Force on 9/11

I find this section a little confusing. It’s entltled” Why there was NOT a “stand down” order”, but goes on to to make stand down type arguments, only to finish up by saying a stand down order would have been too risky.

Robinowitz’s claim here is that there was no explicit stand-down order, but that there was nevertheless a de facto stand down via deliberately-induced confusion and distractions.

When the Air Force “scrambles” a fighter plane to intercept, they usually reach the plane in question in minutes.”

There is no source for his claim.

Indeed there isn’t. And, as I said in my original post, the idea that the FAA’s and NORAD’s pre-9/11 standard operating procedures would have ensured that at least some of the planes were intercepted before they hit the buildings is a claim I that haven’t yet seen adequately documented by anyone. If people in the 9/11 Truth movement are going to continue to make such a claim (especially in the face of some counter-evidence, such as you’ve presented), we need some good primary-source documentation, not just common-sense arguments.

However, even if one doesn’t claim that the planes necessarily could have been intercepted in time, it’s still worth exploring the possibility that someone in the government might have created some deliberate distractions, to ensure that the planes weren’t intercepted in time. Of course, such a claim would need to be backed up with some good evidence too.

“Ultimately, Flight 93 was shot down around 10:06 am near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, although this was kept concealed from the public.”

Flight 93 was brought down because of the actions of some brave passengers fighting for their lives. All the evidence, particularly the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, which shows all systems functioning
normally until the plane hit the ground, point to this.

I have not paid much attention to the whole question of what might have happened to Flight 93, because, even if it could be shown that Flight 93 was shot down, this in itself wouldn’t be strong evidence for MIHOP or even LIHOP. It was widely reported in the mass media that there was an order to shoot it down, and indeed one could argue that it should have been shot down, under the circumstances. So the only question is whether the struggle in the cockpit brought the plane down before it could be shot down as ordered. If indeed it should turn out that an actual shoot-down was covered up, one could then argue that perhaps the motive for the coverup was merely a belated attempt to prevent a lawsuit by the families of the passengers, or some other legal or bureaucratic issue. So, I have not considered the question of what happened to Flight 93 to be nearly as important as the question of what happened to the WTC buildings.

Be that as it may, Jim Hoffman presents some evidence for a shoot-down of Flight 93 here, here, and here.

I find that insulting to the memory of these passengers.

Apparently the passengers did act in a heroic manner, regardless of what finally brought the plane down.

Anyhow, later in your comment you gave a timeline for what happened to Flight 77. There have been a total of three different, mutually contradictory timelines released, regarding all four planes. Which timeline are you using?

The Ptech stuff is pure speculation. I have only one comment on this: As this company received approval during the Clinton administration, does this mean the Clinton administration is also part of the conpiracy?

No. Regardless of how/when/why the Ptech system was installed, its significance is that it may have provided Cheney with a possible means of sowing confusion on 9/11. Of course, one would need more evidence that such confusion was in fact sown.

I just now came across the blog entry The Pentagon Flight Path Misinformation, Stand-Down, War Games, and the Three Mysterious Planes. It contains, among other things, some information about the FAA’s version of what happened on 9/11. For whatever reason, it appears that the FAA’s version was completely ignored by the 9/11 Commission. Anyhow, the FAA’s timelines has the FAA responding a lot sooner than they did according to any of NORAD’s various different timelines. Of course, no matter what may have really happened, we can expect each government agency to try to make itself look good, at the expense of other government agencies. However, according to David Ray Griffin, the FAA was handicapped in its ability to defend itself, because the FBI immediately seized the FAA’s tapes (but did not seize NORAD’s tapes). Griffin suspects that NORAD’s tapes (as released to the 9/11 Commission) may have doctored, because they make NORAD look even better than NORAD’s older timelines did.

These relate to what a base commander could order without higher approval, and show that these regs and their change in June 2001 were not the issue. As for the distinction between hijacking and emergency protocol, I forget what Griffin said, but basically the question is why fighters weren’t timely scrambled to intercept the blips, not why the planes were not shot down or some action taken once they were intercepted.

There were much fewer planes on high alert status after the Cold War, but that is partly a problem of definition. I did some research on this back in 2002 but never wrote it up. What I recall is that during the Cold War there were many more planes with engines running and pilots in the cockpit ready to scramble, and very few now, but there are still a lot of planes with pilots on alert ready to scramble on short notice. Maybe the difference between 3 minutes to 10,000 feet to 8, 10, 12 or 15 minutes – something like that. Bottom line, there was procedure and capacity to have fighters to meet those planes well before they hit. The war games are a good explanation why that didn’t happen — lots of fake blips in the air that day. Otis Air Base reports not being able to find Flight 11 as identified by FAA. Lie? Maybe, maybe not – who knows?

Charlieneb, you link to the False Blips page at 9/11 Myths, which says “There’s nothing in the article to say the “injects” affected FAA screens, or NEADS, or even everyone in the command centre.” This may have been written before the Vanity Fair article “9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes,” which describes confusion of NEADS technicians as to whether they were viewing real planes or “inputs” on their screens.

The intercept times page at 9/11 Myths cites testimony by General Arnold. This testimony does not comport with DoD regs, and Arnold’s testimony has little credibility given the drastic change in the military’s story between 2001 and 2004.

Whether or not fighters could have reached the planes, they should have been off the ground much quicker, and not reaching Flight 175 is the least plausible.

Confusion and faked blips explains all this without requiring broad complicity among FAA and NEADs technicians and NEADs pilots.

Have you listened to the FAA controller that followed Flight 175 in a steep dive that he said would be hell on the passengers? It was on Discovery channel and is available on YouTube. The timing of this dive conflicts with the calls from Flight 175, suggesting that this controller was not following Flight 175. No need to posit faked calls or faked passengers.

The NORAD Tapes,” which describes confusion of NEADS technicians as to whether they were viewing real planes or “inputs” on their screens.

The only mention I see about false blips in the Vanity Fair article is in the commentary by the writer of the article. I see no mention of false blips in the dialog between ATCs and NORAD. I have not heard of any ATC reporting confusion over false blips in subsequent testimony.

The reporters commentary is presumably based on what he was told about simulated inputs as the basis for the confusion shown by “real world or exercise?”

As for the Flight 175 ATC, I’ll look for it. The ATC’s name is Dave Bottiglia, and what he says suggests that the call from Hanson came from a different plane than the plane (or blip) in a dive that Bottiglia was monitoring. I wrote all this in comment somewhere but can’t find it.

Thanks for the info. However, the above URL points to a comment by Ningen that seems to be about Mineta’s testimony, not about the DoD regulations, and contains links to an MSNBC interview with Norman Mineta and the 9/11 Commission site. I would appreciate it very much if you could point me more directly to the DoD regulations you’re referring to.

These relate to what a base commander could order without higher approval, and show that these regs and their change in June 2001 were not the issue. As for the distinction between hijacking and emergency protocol, I forget what Griffin said, but basically the question is why fighters weren’t timely scrambled to intercept the blips, not why the planes were not shot down or some action taken once they were intercepted.

My question about what the standard operating procedures is most certainly relevant to the latter issue too. What needs to be established here is whether, under the SOP’s in effect at the time, it was likely that the planes would even have been intercepted within a half hour after an air traffic controller first noticed a problem. So far I haven’t seen any documentation showing that this would indeed have been likely.

There were much fewer planes on high alert status after the Cold War, but that is partly a problem of definition. I did some research on this back in 2002 but never wrote it up. What I recall is that during the Cold War there were many more planes with engines running and pilots in the cockpit ready to scramble, and very few now, but there are still a lot of planes with pilots on alert ready to scramble on short notice. Maybe the difference between 3 minutes to 10,000 feet to 8, 10, 12 or 15 minutes – something like that. Bottom line, there was procedure and capacity to have fighters to meet those planes well before they hit.

Perhaps, unless there were too many bureaucratic delays within the FAA before NORAD could even be notified. What needs to be established is whether the latter was in fact plausibly true on 9/11, given whatever the FAA’s actual SOP’s might have been at that time. Ditto for possible bureaucratic delays within NORAD.

I thought that comment contained links to the DoD regs, but you’re right, it was in a thread about Mineta. 9/11 Blogger is offline so I can’t check now.

I don’t know about a half hour. The question is whether delayed launch of interceptors is explained by regulations that might or might not require high level approval for certain actions. The answer is no.

Reponses to emergencies follow routine procedures, and there’s no reason they would not have on 9/11. After over 50 years of regular commercial aviation, this is just common sense. Seriously — the claims are patently absurd. The best explanation is confusion because of war games and fale inputs, which raises different questions from why planes weren’t scrambled earlier.

We’re trying to explain the delay from 8:20, when we are told Flight 11 went off radar/radio, but we have no way of knowing whether that premise is correct. David Ray Griffin does a good job, for the most part, of explaining the inconsistencies in changing official claims, but he takes certain facts as true — especially Flight 11/ 8:20 — where there’s no way of knowing whether any of it is true.

I don’t want to dig around for the DoD regs again which is why I used that comment. The links are all there. Right after 9/11, Jared Israel at Emperor’s Clothes presented accurate information on those regulations, but many have mistated those regulations since. Griffin has them right in his Debunking book. The bottom line is that the June 2001 change should not have slowed intercept, even if it may have required or encouraged high level approval for shoot downs. So it’s a red herring – and perhaps was designed for that. I think the whole “stand down” meme is a well-designed red herring, and that Griffin’s book unfortunately reinforces that.

Reponses to emergencies follow routine procedures, and there’s no reason they would not have on 9/11. After over 50 years of regular commercial aviation, this is just common sense. Seriously — the claims are patently absurd.

The above is the common-sense argument used by many in the 9/11 Truth movement. However, the world does not necessarily abide by common sense, and at least one “debunking” site (cited in an earlier comment on this page) does provide a few counter-examples, i.e. news stories about pre-9/11 intercepts (and even one post-9/11 intercept, if I recall correctly) that took longer than a half hour after the problem was first noticed by an air traffic controller. So if we’re going to argue that even one, let alone all, of the planes should have been intercepted within a half hour after a problem was first noticed, we need documentation. If you ever happen to run into relevant documentation I would appreciate it very much if you could let me know, with a specific reference.

As I’ve already noted, I did not find the documentation in Griffin’s book on this point to be adequate.

page 7 of 23, section 4.5.1, authorizes immediate responses by local military commanders to requests of civl authorities where imminently serious conditions exist and time does not allow prior approval from of higher headquarters.

The Directive as a whole provides for planning for responses, so it is likely there was subsidiary guidance to commanders for dealing with immediate responses.

The June 2001 change made no exception for “potentially lethal assistance,” as claimed by Hoffmann.

Gerard Holmgren, who I think is the best 9/11 researcher, has written about this, in a cached article. The third page is most relevant., and describes how Hoffmann distorts the DOD regulations. Holmgren’s work has been pulled from the Internet, which is a real shame.

We can’t ever prove that a response should have been quicker, and we don’t have access to all the information. This is just one part of the story, and when the “anomalies” stack so high, and the original story is both implausible and unproven, trying to prove this one point becomes counterproductive. As I’ve said, I think the whole issue is a red herring because we don’t know what was in the air that day and what NEADS and FAA saw on their screens. We only know facts that have been released, which are selective even if true.

That said, comparisons of response to small planes, as opposed to response to a commercial airliner emergency with hundreds of lives at stake, are probably not apt.

We can’t ever prove that a response should have been quicker, and we don’t have access to all the information.

If indeed it’s true that a response should have been quicker, it should be possible to prove this via a combination of (1) old FAA documents and (2) news stories about pre-9/11 intercepts (preferably of domestic passenger jets).

Agreed that there were plenty of other anomolies on 9/11. However, we should be able to present solid evidence for any anomoly that we do assert.

Diane said: “we should be able to present solid evidence for any anomoly that we do assert.”

Indeed, we can point out the logical inconsistencies of the official accounts, and point out their further lack of credibility given changing accounts, as long as we don’t assume that we have therey figured out what really happened. We can’t really do that, since our factual premises based on official accounts may be lies.

And on the other side, just because we can’t figure out what really happened in relation to military response, the fact that the official explanation doesn’t make sense, in combination with many other ways in which the official story doesn’t make sense, combine to make a compelling case for, at least, a serious investigation.

I was fortunate, or unfortunate, to know about Emperor’s Clothes from their work on Yugoslavia, project of the cruise missile humanitarians, and so have had the forture or misfortune of questioning 9/11 since their work was published in November 2001. I also learned a lot about government lies in general from that site, and from Chomsky and Herman before that. Too bad ZMag is so blind when it comes to the biggest lie, 9/11, which should not be hard to believe for ZMag writers of all people.

Here’s a recent article by Edward Herman making similar arguments about Yugoslavia:

I was referring to a comment at your latest post. This might be better for email. Anyway, I’m glad you like TENC’s work. Their work on the U.S. government’s use of jihad as a geopolitical tool is also quite interesting. Their conclusions may be debatable, but their documentation is always trustworthy.

One of the military exercises that took place on 9/11 was Operation Northern Vigilance, in which quite a few fighter jets that could otherwise have been available to defend the East Coast were sent to Alaska and Northern Canada. However, according to NORAD’s official description, Northern Vigilance wasn’t just an exercise; its purpose was to monitor a Russian exercise. This Toronto Star article, 9 December 2001, also said about Northern Vigilance: “Part of this exercise is pure simulation, but part is real world: NORAD is keeping a close eye on the Russians, who have dispatched long-range bombers to their own high north on a similar exercise.” Anyhow, the Toronto Star article also mentioned that Operation Northern Vigilance involved “simulated information,” also known as “inject.”